Creative Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre with Helen Hagemann

Prose with Helen Hagemann Friday, 23^rd August. 10.00am-noon. Room 2, Upstairs, North Wing, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1 Finnerty Street, Fremantle.  $20 OOTA  $25 Non-OOTA

Helen brings you more on the study of "World-wide short fiction", reading Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt from The Illustrated Man. The class includes writing exercises and looking at Bradbury’s short story techniques including Dystopian fiction.  

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films. Bradbury claimed a wide variety of influences, and described discussions he might have with his favorite poets and writers, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Wolfe. From Steinbeck, he said he learned "how to write objectively and yet insert all of the insights without too much extra comment." He studied Eudora Welty for her "remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line."

    Bradbury resisted the categorization of being a science fiction writer. ‘First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. It was named so to represent the temperature at which paper ignites. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time — because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.’

"The Veldt" is a short story written by Ray Bradbury that was published originally as "The World the Children Made" in the September 23, 1950 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, later republished in the anthology The Illustrated Man in 1951. The anthology is a collection of short stories that were mostly published individually in magazines beforehand. The rise in the popularity of television had a direct influence on Bradbury’s story “The Veldt.” 

At the time the story was written, many American families were acquiring their first television sets, and no one was sure exactly how this new technology would impact the relationships among family members. Some people were afraid that watching too much television would lead to the total breakdown of the family unit.